Worst. Movie. Ever.: Quick Thoughts on Crank 2: High Voltage
So let me set the stage, here:
My friend Brandon, my brother Troy, and I play nerdy board games on Monday nights...I get a call yesterday from my friend Brandon who lets me know that he's watching Crank 2 and that the opening is gloriously bad. So naturally he pauses the movie and invites me over to watch it while we wait for my brother to get home from work and join us for our nerdy board games. I only mention this because this is probably the only way I would have seen Crank 2: High Voltage. Seriously...this is the worst movie ever made. I will explain how atrocious this movie is after the jump:
It's a sad experience watching this movie, because you realize how hard it is for good, intelligent, independent films to get financing and theatrical runs...and yet there are countless idiots out there who give these "filmmakers" money to make shit like Crank 2. For those that read this blog regularly you know that I am not averse to bad movie watching; in fact, a lot of the time I find great joy in watching bad movies with a community of friends -- it's a fun, not-so-serious time to hang out and laugh at the movies. However, those movies are unintentionally bad. They aren't insulting like Crank 2 is. And I thought what I was getting into was just another gratuitous exercise in the Jason Statham (who I actually think has potential as an action star if someone would just give him a role that's worth a damn) line of action films (like The Transporter films, which seem like harmless fun compared to Crank 2.)...oh how I was wrong.
There is so much ugliness in this movie. Racial stereotyping that ranges from the offensive (ho ho look it's a Saigon whore saying things like "sucky sucky") to nasty (words like "slant" and "beaner" and "fag" get tossed around without a care in the world) to just downright stupid (the have subtitles for all the foreign characters even though they speak English throughout...and not broken English...the filmmakers just thought they were being funny). There's nothing ironic about the ugly racism and homophobia in the film; it's frat boy filmmaking run amok, and it shows all that is wrong with the people who think movies like this are cool.
The movie isn't even tolerable. Every lens, angle, and editing trick is used to go from one shot to the next every second. There's a title card that's inserted during a scene where Statham's character is running that says "nine seconds later" and then it shows him running some more. If that's a joke, I don't get it. There are more scenes of people getting hit in the balls than a Disney movie, and all the ingredients are here that make drunken frat boys laugh (because that is this films target audience): white people talking like black people, old grannies swearing, fat Asian guys acting silly, Asian whore jokes that are as archaic as the filmmakers sensibilities, and a character names Poon Dong...which pretty much tells you the I.Q. of the people who made this movie.
In possibly the worst scene of the movie (well that's hard to quantify, really, there are so many worthy nominees) Statham and his girlfriend have sex on a horse racing track...in front of everyone...and then scene just keeps going and going, showing multiple sexual positions being used and other stupid gratuitous tactics. The scene goes on forever...it's unreal. Who in the hell thought this was any good?
It's appropriate that the movie ends with its star giving the middle finger to the camera, because that's all this was...a big fuck you to the audience proving that they can make anything they want and people will sit through it. The movie gets a 6.2 on imdb. That shows you the intelligence of most of the people who vote on imdb. The film can barely sit still long enough for you to enjoy it on an ironic level...it makes a Tony Scott movie look like My Dinner With Andre. This is without a doubt the worst movie I have ever seen.
Sounds terrible. Never before have I been so happy to have to have been at work, as it likely saved me from going ahead and watching this with you guys.
ReplyDeleteI will agree that Statham could become THE action star, but he hasn't really had that crossover role yet that puts him in the Stallone/Arnold/Willis at-their-peak realm.
And game night, nerdy? Wha!?
Yes...we are nerds. I was shocked to see that Crank 2 received a 62% "fresh" rating at Rotten Tomatoes...certainly not the most valid barometer of how good a movie is, but holy cow! 62%!?!?
ReplyDeleteThis experience happen to all of us, to be honest, and you always ask yourself why you squandered such valuable time. But it also relieves the pressure, no?
ReplyDeleteSam:
ReplyDeleteThis movie just bored me, and it actually didn't even do the job of relieving pressure like mindless action pictures are supposed to. Oh well...live and learn I suppose.
Certainly the worst movie ever made. i was also shocked to see 6.2 on IMDB and was thinking about somewhere around negatives. Seriously jason is a good actor how could he sign such a shit.
ReplyDeleteWORST no i am sorry WORSTEST movie ever.
Yeah I love Jason and his movies and crank was dare I say alright and they should have left it where it was.Crank 2 has got to be the worst film ever produced.I ask Jason WHY? Why did you lower yourself to a movie like this?
ReplyDeleteWow, Up late and this crap is on IFC. This is almost like watching porn without the sex. Bad dialogue, terrible shot composition and atrocious humor. You have to do a lot of drugs as a director or have HUGE balls to put something like this out there.
ReplyDeleteI became interested in Crank after listening to the How Did This Get Made podcast rave about 1 and 2. (I still recommend the podcast in spite of this). They weren't claiming they were high art or anything, but they went so far as to get one of the directors in to talk about the movies in a gushing light. I decided to watch the first one, getting a bit drunk in preparation and quite enjoyed myself. It's good absurd action nonsense. It's meant to be like a crazy video game and pulls it off admirably.
ReplyDeleteTonight, 3 days later, I decided to repeat the getting drunk thing and watched Crank 2. I just turned it off after 25 minutes. It's unbelievably terrible. The worst part, for me, is the rampant misogyny (I'm male, straight, don't hate women, btw) Women are treated as sexual fodder. Naked women, frequent use of the 'whore', a strip club, his girlfriend parading about essentially naked, a bizarrely out of place lesbian 'thing' in the back of a police car, close ups of female crotch shots, a close up of a bare female ass being groped and slapped. It's mind boggling. The first film wasn't as mindlessly gratuitous as this. Yes, his girlfriend's role in the first movie was little more than damsel in distress, and we even saw a fleeting shot of her exposed breast, but in this they went the extra moron-mile and made her a stripper, albeit with black tape across her nipples (like in the GTA games which are the movies' obvious inspiration), but just as it's childish nonsense misguidedly posing as 'adult' there, it's unwatchable trash here too. The directors probably patted themselves on the back at how edgy and subversive they were being, not realsing how insanely outdated and conservative they really are. Treating women like shit is as old and unenlightened as it gets. It's like something out of the lowest rent 70s without any shred of irony. They would no doubt unironically enjoy Benny Hill. I'm British, and just to let Americans know, no one here likes Benny Hill and he is largely forgotton and never repeated.
And if that wasn't bad enough, the pace is terrible compared to the first movie which starts at top speed and keeps going to the end. This is a disaster. I don't even care if it gets better later on, I'm not going to sit here and continue to be insulted by this deeply, deeply, DEEPLY, AGRESSIVELY unintelltigent crap.